


for all this night thou hast me kept

by StopTalkingAtMe



Category: Poltergeist: The Legacy
Genre: Angst, Episode: s3e02, F/F, First Kiss, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Slice of Life, Tag to the season three opening, Vampirism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:48:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,637
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21933250
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopTalkingAtMe/pseuds/StopTalkingAtMe
Summary: It’s over, Alex,Derek said, but she isn't certain he believes it.She's not certain she believes it either.
Relationships: Rachel Corrigan/Alexandra Moreau
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3
Collections: Yuletide Madness 2019





	for all this night thou hast me kept

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ariestess](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ariestess/gifts).



The wine streams down the inside of the glass, deep red catching the light. There are scattered points of light reflected in its surface, diamonds on a base of ruby. Saliva floods Alex’s mouth.

She’s aware of her pulse, of the rush of the blood in her ears. She already knows how it’s going to taste, and how it will feel in her mouth, the sensation so vivid she runs her tongue over her teeth to make certain they’re normal, a reflexive habit she cannot seem to shake.

"Alex?"

She starts. The neck of the bottle clinks against the rim of the glass, spilling some wine down the outside. "Oh damn."

Rachel is watching her from the doorway, smiling, but with veiled caution in her eyes. "Thirsty, huh?"

Alex forces a smile, realising belatedly that the glass is far too full. She recorks the bottle, and lifted up the glass to mops up the ring of spilled wine the base has left on the table. "I guess I just zoned out for a minute. Kat okay?"

Rachel nods. "Fast asleep." She announces it with relish and the air of someone announcing a miracle, which considering the storm raging outside probably isn’t so far from the truth.

Alex considers the glass, but she can still imagine the lingering taste of blood on her tongue and she’s lost her taste for it, so she leaves it where it is and wanders over to the window. "It’s really coming down out there."

Rain sleets down the glass, its ceaseless drumming echoing the music in her blood. She should feel warm – the Legacy has no shortage of funds and they certainly haven’t skimped on insulation – but it’s as if there is no pane of glass between her and the outside. She can feel the rain pelting her face, fresh and invigorating.

A sudden flash of lightning illuminates the gardens, and is almost instantly followed by a peal of thunder rolling out in a lazy growl.

The storm has been coming for a while and she's glad it's finally broken. The past few days San Francisco has been sweating beneath a dense blanket of humid heat, which made the sweat pool in the small of Alex's back and turned her mind towards New Orleans. From there it couldn’t go anywhere good.

It got her to thinking of Phillippe and of Justine, of what her old friends had become and what had become of them. And too much grief held danger. So Derek warned her when she confided with him about her fears. He advised her to face it head on, and to remember that the solution offered by vampirism was in truth no solution at all. _It’s over, Alex_ , he said, and she felt a stab of intuition – and was unable to tell if it was a lingering affect of what had happened to her or simply a reflection of her own fears – that he wasn’t certain he believed it.

She's not sure she believes it either.

She can’t shake the feeling that it isn’t over, that it will never be over, not for her. She can’t even bring herself sleep with the window open these days. It’s as if some splintered fragment of her soul has been lost forever, and that she’s been marked and will forever be a target.

There are more of them out there. She’d hoped, aware that it was probably naive of her, that perhaps they had all been destroyed in the explosion, but Derek gently disabused her of that notion.

It’s a horrible feeling how easy it was to lose her grip on herself. Still, even now, when she recalls Justine asking her if she wanted to change, her heart, her soul, her blood all sing out _yes_. It’s an unwelcome glimpse of how easy it is to be seduced to the dark side – how vulnerable they all are, balancing on a tightrope stretched across an abyss. One slip, and they will be lost.

It was so easy, that she’s begun to question her position in the Legacy despite Derek’s reassurances, his insistence that it could have happened to any one of them. She isn’t sure she believes him about that either.

More trivially, she’s barely been able to look at Nick since, and it’s a relief that he has accompanied Derek to investigate a potential haunting at a Legacy-affiliated dig in England. A deliberate choice on Derek’s part, she suspects. Clearly he judged it prudent to give them both a little space to decompress away from each other. She’s grateful: while she appreciates that Nick has more or less taken things in his stride, she can’t help thinking there’s something a little forced about his teasing, an unvoiced question of why out of all of her colleagues in the Legacy she might have chosen _him_.

Rachel is on the sofa, her shoes kicked off, and is still watching her. "You sure you’re okay?"

"I’m fine." She says it too sharply, and grimaces, acknowledging how defensive she sounds. "Mostly."

"Ah." Rachel lifts her arm in a gesture of invitation and Alex sinks down onto the sofa, lets Rachel pull her into a hug. "Wanna talk about it?"

"There’s really nothing to talk about."

"Really?"

"Uh huh. I mean, well, apart from… you know. _Everything_."

Rachel laughs, and Alex groans.

"I really messed things up, didn’t I?" she says. "I don’t think my relationship with Nick’ll ever be the same again."

"He’ll get over it."

"Maybe." Alex gives a rueful smile. "I’m just not that sure about me."

Rachel pulls her close, and presses their temples together, her hair mingling with Alex’s dark curls. The room is warm, the rhythm of the rain striking against the window lulling Alex closer to a state of relaxation.

She’s been dreaming about it recently, the labyrinthine network of caverns and crypts, which appeared in her dreams as candle-light lit fairy grottoes, when they were really just cold damp caves. One almost magical memory overlaid with another that's squalid and base. Her memories are as distorted as a reflection in a funhouse mirror, and she can’t be certain which of them is the truth. She has a feeling neither is entirely true.

She remembers Phillippe, suave and seductive, despite the unspoken desperation in his eyes. He was every bit as much a victim as she was. And Justine too, their real selves trapped inside the monsters they’d become. She’ll look into it, she decides, once she’s recovered enough. Find out what happened to them, and how they come to be turned. She owes them that much.

Once the ground beneath her feet feels steady enough. Once she’s stopped dreaming. Once she’s stopped feeling that empty ache in her chest, the all-consuming thirst that nothing seems to quench. Once she can believe that no part of her secretly still wants the change.

She’s been dreaming about that too, a life pinched out like a candle at her hands, a compact signed and sealed with blood. Dying would have hurt, but it would have been glorious too, all her senses sharpened to crystal clarity, the rush of power, electric in her veins. She feels lips on a bared throat, the pulse of blood, breath on skin, her savage joy and hunger finally assuaged, but when she pulls back in her dreams, it’s not Nick beneath her, but Rachel.

Rachel’s fingers are interlaced through hers. Her cheek rests against the top of Alex’s, the two of them intertwined. Her presence should be comforting, filled with almost motherly affection, but Alex has been carrying an image of her in her mind’s eye for a while, and there’s nothing motherly about that version of Rachel, with blood on her skin and her lips parted in ecstatic joy,

It terrifies her how close she came to killing Nick, but what terrifies her more is what might have come next: would she have gone on to target Rachel the way her former friends targetted her? Maybe that was the reason why she chose Nick as her sacrifice: because she wanted to keep Rachel with her. Dear God, could she really have done that to Kat?

"I wish I could have been there," Rachel says, and Alex represses a shudder.

"I’m glad you weren’t," she says with feeling.

"Hey." Rachel curls her fingers gently under Alex’s jaw and tilts her head around gently so she can see Alex’s face. And it’s too much, Rachel’s warm dark eyes and her mouth too close. The mingled aromas of the shampoo and soap she uses, with the scent of her own skin underneath. The heightened perception of the change returns every so often, usually when Alex least wants them, like now, with Rachel so close, and with the way her thoughts have been going lately. 

She stiffens, and something flickers across Rachel’s face. "It’s over, Alex."

This time, Alex almost believes it.

She meets Rachel’s warm eyes and finds no darkness there, no lost soul looking out, screaming for release. It’s just Rachel, warm and comforting and far too close. And she isn’t certain, either, which of them is responsible for the kiss. It’s Alex who starts to tilt her head upwards, but it seems that Rachel pulls her in just as much, parting her lips as they meet Alex’s and burying her fingers in Alex’s hair. The kiss is slow and sweet, and gentler than anything Alex has been imagining in her recent dreams, but it feels right; it feels like what she’s been searching for.

Afterwards, she rests her head against Rachel’s chest, feeling safer than she has in a while. Another flash of lightning turns the world outside white-hot, but it’s a long few seconds before the following thunderstrike. The storm is passing over. So it seems at least.

**Author's Note:**

> The title came from a Mediaeval prayer of the morning, which can be found here:
> 
> https://aclerkofoxford.blogspot.com/2013/05/a-medieval-morning-prayer.html


End file.
